might as well face it
Reward mechanism involved in addiction likely regulates pair bonds between monogamous animals
(from Emory)
___________________
I've never met Art, but I understand he's a nice guy.
on understanding Art
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.
We have to recognise that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
[Roger Fry] gave us the term 'Post-Impressionist' without realizing that the late 20th century would soon be entirely fenced in with posts.
Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent. Better to pretend that art is dumb, or at least has nothing to say that makes sense to us. If art, all art is concerned with truth, than a society in denial will not find much use for it.
Canonising pictures is one way of killing them...so that what was wild is tamed, what was objecting, becomes Authority...When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history, popularity, association, all crowd between the viewer and the picture and block it out.
'I don't understand this poem'
'I never listen to classical music'
'I don’t like this picture'
are common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something about the speaker. That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because the ignorant, the lazy, or the plain confused are not likely to want to admit themselves as such. We hear a lot about the arrogance of the artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience, who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and childhood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making, who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up, flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant. This is not arrogance; of course they can absorb in a few moments, and without any effort, the sum of the artist and the art.
Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We have already tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?
If we say that art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?' The usual question 'What has happened to art?' is too easy an escape route.
Jeanette Winterson - from "Art Objects", in World Art, v.4, 1995.
Reward mechanism involved in addiction likely regulates pair bonds between monogamous animals
(from Emory)
___________________
I've never met Art, but I understand he's a nice guy.
on understanding Art
Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.
We have to recognise that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.
[Roger Fry] gave us the term 'Post-Impressionist' without realizing that the late 20th century would soon be entirely fenced in with posts.
Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent. Better to pretend that art is dumb, or at least has nothing to say that makes sense to us. If art, all art is concerned with truth, than a society in denial will not find much use for it.
Canonising pictures is one way of killing them...so that what was wild is tamed, what was objecting, becomes Authority...When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history, popularity, association, all crowd between the viewer and the picture and block it out.
'I don't understand this poem'
'I never listen to classical music'
'I don’t like this picture'
are common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something about the speaker. That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because the ignorant, the lazy, or the plain confused are not likely to want to admit themselves as such. We hear a lot about the arrogance of the artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience, who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and childhood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making, who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up, flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant. This is not arrogance; of course they can absorb in a few moments, and without any effort, the sum of the artist and the art.
Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We have already tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?
If we say that art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?' The usual question 'What has happened to art?' is too easy an escape route.
Jeanette Winterson - from "Art Objects", in World Art, v.4, 1995.
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